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Downloading Zoom Cloud Recordings

If you have a licensed Gettysburg College Zoom account, you can save video recordings to the Zoom cloud. This cloud space is meant for short-term storage and is cleared at the end of each semester. If you have recordings on the Zoom cloud that you wish to save beyond the semester’s end, you must download them to your computer.

  1. Log into Zoom using the Zoom web interface.
  2. From the side-bar menu, choose Recordings > Cloud Recordings.
Zoom-Recordings and Cloud Recordings menu options
  1. Note: If you don’t see the side-bar menu, try expanding the size of your browser window or clicking the arrow on the top menu bar to reveal a pull-down menu.
Zoom-drop-down menu for smaller browser windows
  1. Click the meeting that you wish to download from the list of recordings.
Zoom recordings list
  1. Click the Download button to download all available files associated with the title. (Depending on your recording settings, this may contain a video file, an audio only file, a transcript file, and a chat file.)
Zoom recording Download button
  1. Depending on your browser settings, you may receive pop-up windows asking you to save each available file.
Zoom-save file pop-up window
  1. Save the files to your computer.  By default, they will download to your Downloads folder. 
  2. It’s best to move each session to a folder with the name and/or date of each meeting, so that you can find the files in the future. If you have a lot of Zoom video files that you wish to archive, you may want to purchase an external hard drive for storage so that you don’t fill up your computer’s hard drive.
  3. If you need to share the Zoom recordings with other people, you will need to upload them to a streaming video server, such as YouTube or Panopto, Gettysburg College’s streaming video server.

Panopto is a video distribution system rather than a file archive space. While IT does not limit the amount of storage space that a user has, the system is set up to delete any videos that have not been played in the last three years. (This time-frame corresponds to the course deletion schedule in Moodle.)  Every time a student or other user clicks on a video in Panopto this three-year time limit is reset for another three years. This ensures that old, outdated material that is no longer being used is not taking up space on our Panopto system.  Thus, always back up videos you wish to archive permanently to either an external hard drive or your Microsoft OneDrive storage space.

Updated on December 6, 2022

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